Open Source with Christopher Lydon
Latest Episodes
Lessons from Hannah Arendt
Were calling on Hannah Arendt for the twenty-first centurycould she teach us how to think our way out of the authoritarian nightmare? Arendt wrote the book for all time on Hitlers Germany and Stali
Taylor Swift’s Tortured Poets
Were going to school on Taylor Swift, in the Harvard course. And all we know is, as her song says, were enchanted to meet her. Taylor Swift comes out of literature but shes more than ...
Of Melville and Marriage
We speak of the mystery of Herman Melville, or the misery of Melville, the American masterpiece man. For Moby-Dick alone, he is our Shakespeare, our Dantethough he fled the writing of prose for the l
Against Despair
The subject, in a word, is despair, both public and private. The poets and spiritual seekers Christian Wiman and his wife Danielle Chapman are back to goad us, each with a new book. Their project ...
The Rebel’s Clinic
Frantz Fanon is our interest in this podcast. The man had charisma across the board in a short life and a long afterlife. A black man from the Caribbean, he went to France, first as ...
Algorithmic Anxiety
The question is how digital tech picks and chooses the content that comes to your phones and your brain, or, as Kyle Chayka puts it in a brave new book Filterworld: how algorithms flattened culture.
The Humbling of Harvard
Oldest and far the richest among American universities, Harvard is the apex, in some sense, of American intellectualism, and it will be a long time figuring out just how it lost a big game it ...
The Most Secret Memory of Men
The only way into this podcast is a long leap headfirst into postcolonial French fiction, of all things, and a novel titled The Most Secret Memory of Men. Our guest is the toast of literary ...
The Revolutionary
On the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, were face to face, almost, with an American political type thats gone missing in our third century. Check this resume: hes principled, hes prepare
Israel and Palestine Across History
With the historian John Judis we are looking for a longer timeline in the crisis of Gaza, Israel, Palestine. It has been, in fact, a century of layered conflict between Arabs and Jews, two peoples ...